Rates from Bankrate.com

The Digital Skeptic: 3 Tech Items You'll Hear About From CES 2013

Written by: Jonathan Blum01/03/13 - 8:00 AM EST

NEW YORK ( TheStreet) -- And so we begin again with the 2013 International CES.

There was a time the consumer electronics business was simple. Products were sold at actual retail stores. Store owners would need to choose their lines. So they headed out to Las Vegas in early January to meet vendors at a trade show called, not surprisingly, the Consumer Electronics Show. There retailers would test product, check out the competition and schmooze -- all the while doing the "What Happens in Vegas Stays in Vegas" thing.

Then everyone sobered up and headed home to see what would actually sell with customers.

By modern standards, of course, this is almost laughable. Today, maybe a dozen big-scale retail buyers from the likes of Wal-Mart (WMT) , Amazon (AMZN) and Target (TGT) control consumer tech -- and most probably don't even bother going to CES. Sadly, the story told by journalists and investors about tech products often overwhelms the products themselves.

But still, I go. Each and every year -- on my own nickel -- I head out to the Mojave Desert to walk the CES show floor in the traditional style. Over a full week, I log the miles strolling up and down the long aisles, sniffing out trends, touching product and otherwise looking as many real people in the eye as I can.

Based on the past several months of prep for the trip next week, here's what I will be looking at most closely for some much-needed upside in consumer electronics.

The "hybrid" display Between absurdly expensive movies, retailers struggling to make the technology's value clear and on-and-off-again support for custom content from cable companies, it's clear 3-D will continue to be a non-event this year. Investors can also count on emerging so-called Ultra High-Definition TV standards, often called 4K and 8K, to be similarly non-eventful. That makes it easy to assume that the only display news at this CES will be overhyped advancements in portable screen technologies such as AMOLED. (It's what makes iPhones, iPads and Droids look so cool.)

But from what I am seeing there should be some fresh love for so-called hybrid screens and projectors. These displays mix imaging technologies in single devices to improve performance. Take the ViewSonic Pro9000 projector ($3,999). This unit cleverly splits the rendering duties between an LED light engine and several lasers to create a projector with solid resolution, good color balance and almost no heat or distracting fan noise. It doesn't hurt that lamp life is in the stunning 20,000-hour range. ViewSonic is not alone in exploring hybrid displays; Casio and Acer ship similar projectors. In 2011, Apple (AAPL) filed a patent for an e-Ink/LCD hybrid. Mitsubishi has announced a hybrid LED/laser TV.